I study modern European and international history with a focus on France, its empire, and western Europe. By bringing together approaches from global intellectual history and the history of political economy, my research explores how actors in imperial and post-imperial contexts translated moral concepts and ideals like civilization, progress, and well-being into political projects and economic policies.
My dissertation, "Levels of Life: A History of the 'Standard of Living' in France and Its Empire, 1890-1970," is a history of one such concept. A global history told from the vantage point of imperial and decolonizing France, my dissertation follows the array of actors who defined, evaluated, quantified, legislated, and used this concept. Based on archival research in western Europe, Senegal, and the United States, my dissertation shows how interwar social scientists and colonial administrators deployed the standard of living as a tool for generating knowledge used to legitimate colonial rule and that its core meaning was fundamentally altered as a result. My project then illuminates how the standard of living that emerged from these colonial reform projects became central to mid- twentieth century processes, including: the unraveling of European empires, the proliferation of international development projects, European integration, the codification of human rights law, and the consolidation of welfare and developmental states. The “standard of living,” I argue, is necessary to understand the historical construction of a “developed” Global North and a “developing” Global South. My research was supported by the the Social Science Research Council Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF), the Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French Embassy, and the American Historical Association's Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant.
At Penn, I am currently a Doctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center Forum on Keywords. I have co-organized several workshops and reading groups, such as our department's Graduate Colloquium. From 2018-2019, I served as co-president of Clio, the history department's graduate student organization.
Prospective students, please feel free to be in touch if you have questions about studying at Penn.
Committee: Sophia Rosenfeld (advisor), Amy Offner, Warren Breckman, Emily Marker (Rutgers University)
M.A., History, University of Pennsylvania (2019)
A.B., History (with honors), University of Chicago (2016)
Modern Europe (1750-1989), particularly France and its empire; history of the social sciences; international political economy; imperialism and decolonization; human rights; history of welfare states; intellectual history; historical methods; twentieth-century social theory and economic thought
As a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
HIST 201: The Historian's Craft: Global History of Human Rights in the 20th Century (Fall 2023 & Spring 2024)
As a TA or grader at the University of Pennsylvania
PSCI 181: Modern Political Thought (Spring 2021)
HIST 175: History of Brazil (Fall 2020)
HIST 169: History of American Law (Spring 2020)
HIST 174: Capitalism, Socialism, and Crisis in the Twentieth-Century Americas (Fall 2019)
HIST 313: The French Revolution and the Origins of Modern Politics (Spring 2019)
HIST 081: The History of the Modern Middle East Since 1800 (Fall 2018)